Arthur Stringer’s speaker is caught in a moment of high-spirited living—drunk on experience, movement, song—when a sudden awareness of death breaks through. He glimpses a shadow, hears a whisper, and sees a small dark house behind the doorway, a quiet image of the grave where he must eventually sleep. For an instant, the music turns bitter and his body goes cold. The open road and the wine stand for freedom, appetite, and motion; the waiting Door stands for the one certainty he cannot outrun. But instead of sitting with that fear, he reaches again for the dreamlike cup of wine, trying to drown out the ghostly question. The poem leaves him suspended between two truths: the bright open road of life and the patient door waiting at the end. It creates a mood of uneasy intoxication—warm and reckless, but haunted by mortality. The lucid moment is brief, but its chill lingers.
The Question — Summary
Glad with the wine of life, Reeling I go my way, Drunk with the ache of living And mouthing my drunken song! Then comes the lucid moment And the shadow across the lintel; And I hear the ghostly whisper, And I glimpse with startled eyes The Door beyond the doorway, And I see the small dark house Where I must sleep.
Then song turns sour on my lips, And the warmth goes out of my blood, And I turn me back to the beaker, And re-draining my cup of dream, I drown the whispering voices, I banish the ghostly question As to which in the end is true: The wine and the open road? Or the waiting Door?